James Fleeting: front-end web developer

Brian Wood recently posted about his life as a stutterer, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. How he felt as a kid, how he handles it as an adult — everything he said I could easily say “that’s me.” His post was full of things that I wish I had told people. But, ultimately, Brian’s post was about how he grew to be at peace with stuttering. I can’t stop thinking about it because, for some reason, I’m still not.

My stuttering is something I don’t speak of outside my house. I try every day to hide it from friends, co-workers, the drive-thru person, and anybody else I might meet. Brian touched on being a “covert stutterer,” and how a person works to achieve that protection. This includes a fairly long list of words that I know I can’t say and have to avoid at all cost. Some words I just can’t use at the start of a sentence because of their first syllable. Instead, I have to add a word or two in front of it to get the sentence started for me. I need momentum. I have an extremely hard time with numbers as well — “eight” more than any other for some reason. I know when I go to order food there are some things that I’ll never be able to order unless my wife Melissa is there to do it for me.

It can be very frustrating knowing you never get a chance to say what you want.

I know when I carry a conversation I have to stay far enough ahead in my mind with what I’m saying to know when to slow down and avoid a word. I know that my choice of vocabulary and frequent long pauses can come off as strange when I’m really just struggling to contain my stutter.

I’ve stuttered my entire life. I was in speech therapy from grade school to high school, where I learned plenty of techniques to overcome or manage my stutter on a daily basis, but in the end nothing worked. Stuttering as a child, you learn pretty fast to laugh at yourself when being mocked. You also learn to make fun of yourself first, before anyone else can, because somehow that’s better. Some days I can hide my stutter without an issue; granted those days tend to be when Melissa is around to do most of the talking for me. Other days, I just want to avoid the world.

I’ve spent my entire life mastering the skills of avoiding social contact.

I have severe social anxiety, which I try to play off when I talk about not wanting to be around any size group of people – large or small. The past few years I have attempted to put myself in social situations that would require me to talk to people, but because I’ve spent my entire life mastering skills to avoid social contact my instincts often take over, and I tend to shy away from eye contact, to keep my head down, my body turned slightly away from the people nearby. I stand in the corner, or near the door, pretend to be texting, and finally act out answering a phone call, walk outside and don’t come back…rinse and repeat.

What Brian shared got me thinking about why I’m not at peace with my stutter. I’m almost thirty years old, have dealt with it my entire life, and yet I still try to hide it and hope one day I wake up and it’s gone. That is not going to happen. Coming to terms with it and not having it hold me back from at least trying things that I actively avoid can happen.

“Because, at this point in my life, my stutter isn’t going away. I kind of don’t want it to. It’s as much of who I am as anything else. I’ve lived with it longer than anything else I have going on, so sometimes I think it’s the most defining thing about me.” -Brian Wood

I started with how much Brian’s post made me say “that’s me.” I felt that way through his entire post until the quote above, which appeared at the end. I don’t feel like that, but I want to.

At Monkee-Boy we use and love SASS. This of course means we have slowly put together a collection of mixins and functions that we use all the time. Some of the mixins are pretty common and others we have found helpful enough to want at our disposal all the time. Some of these include vertical-align, centerer, ratio, CSS triangle, font-face, breakpoints, and the typical vendor prefixes. We have the mixins up in a GitHub repo if you feel inclined to check it out. You can install using bower install monkee-mixins or npm install monkee-mixins.

Check out the Monkee-Boy GitHub for more projects. It’s not much right now but more is coming.

At Monkee-Boy, we use the constantly growing Google Fonts collection for our web font needs. This comes with several performance benefits: popular fonts are more likely to be cached, Google’s servers are extremely fast, no need to convert for the web, and great selection of fonts.

The right font plays a vital role in great design, but it’s important to note that if your site takes too long to load, the visitor is more likely to leave before even getting to your content. Luckily for us Google knows this and provides an awesome tool that shows you how different fonts will impact your page load.

I recently wrote a post for the Monkee-Boy Blog about quickly testing your Google Fonts. Basically it all comes down to keeping an eye on the number of fonts and font-weights you are using. Performance testing might be something you do at the end of a project during a QA phase but it’s an important part of every project and deserves more attention early on. I’m lucky enough to work with a talented design team who understands and cares about performance just as much as the development team does. The post doesn’t get into any technical performance details and instead is a high level overview so clients understand why selecting 4 fonts and 25 font-weights is not a good idea for their site.

Google recently pushed out it’s Web Starter Kit which is a boilerplate for coding responsive sites. Supporting multiple devices, gulp.js, SASS, and browsersync for testing across devices. As it’s another project by Addy Osmani and Sindre Sorhus, at the very least it’s worth checking out. I’ve spent a little time digging around it and pretty excited about what it brings to the table. Besides being a great starting point it also includes a nice visual component style guide which makes it a little more like Bootstrap or Foundation than H5BP. Check out the full code on Github at google/web-starter-kit.

I'm James Fleeting, a web developer in Austin, Texas. I specialize in front-end development with a passion for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and am currently the Sr. Front End Developer at Monkee Boy. My obsession for the future of the web pushes me to never stop learning and this blog is where I share that information. You can also find me on twitter where I post mostly what I'm eating in 140 characters. When I'm not working, I can be found playing tabletop games, video games, watching movies, exploring Austin, or spending time with my wife and kids.

Projects

Drought: Another boilerplate is exactly what the web needs. There are many, this is mine.

simpleWeather: A simple jQuery plugin to display the current weather information for any location using Yahoo! Weather.

Last.fm New Releases: Chrome Extension that displays the new releases from your favorite artists as pulled from last.fm

simpleLastFM: A jQuery plugin that displays what your listening to, top artists, albums and more from your last.fm profile.